Tim Wigmore works on the Morning Briefing email and was called a "little slave" by the Daily Politics Show. He blogs on British politics, and also contributes to ESPNcricinfo. He tweets @timwig.

If parties want students to support them, they need to ditch their young weirdos

Douglas Carswell's suggestion that Conservative party membership has fallen below 100,000 is the latest sign of how little young people care for political parties. The only exceptions are the oddballs with pre-pubescent dreams of becoming SpAds and parachuted into safe seats.

To those of my generation, it's assumed that anyone who joins a political party is a brown-nosing careerist. They spout pompously like spokesmen, attach their party to their Twitter handles – ToryMinx or LabourLad – and backstab to gain the 15 votes they need to become president of their university club. You wouldn't want to be stuck in a lift with these people. They're more interested in manifestos than personal hygiene.

While Douglas Carswell's idea of creating £1 a year online party membership is a good one, the deeper problem is that many young people just can't be bothered with labels. They are only excited by politicians who develop profiles independent of their parties; Boris Johnson gets thousands of votes from twentysomethings who don't consider themselves Conservatives.

The internet age will destroy party stooges. The appeal of the Conservative MP Sarah Wollaston lies in how lightly she wears her Tory label. As Matthew Holehouse writes, party membership in Wollaston's constitueny has collapsed. But, given her popularity, this needn't be a problem. Through a personal support network – largely created by the open primary she won – she could get people to campaign for her who would never do so for a generic Conservative.

That is the lesson from America: grassroots activism has held up far better than in the UK because it's easy to work for a candidate without signing up to a faceless party machine. Rather than micromanage, parties should free candidates to use the internet to cultivate personal profiles. Finally, MPs are starting to realise the benefits if they use the internet more intelligently.

Joining a political party is becoming the act of an ambitious weirdo. Parties need to accept this uncomfortable reality and let go a bit.